Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Great Minds...

This is kinda cool—compare Anthony Collins' Mona Lisa with the current cover of The New Yorker, which shows a couple chimping a picture of a painting on a tiny digicam while standing in front of the painting.

Reminds me of a Leunig (Australian cartoonist/ poet) cartoon which shows a man and his son sitting on a couch watching a setting sun over mountains on the tv, with their backs to the window which showcases the same scene....

I take it that 'chimping' is a derogatory terms for checking the information on a camera's display after taking a picture. However, to me it seems common sense to check the histogram after a shot; I mean, the couple in the illustration have plenty of time, the painting is not running anywhere.

On the tv sunset, I have this picture, which is not special at all, it shows a couple of eminent mountains in Ushuaia in the back and the same two on a street sign.http://www.flickr.com/photos/45224710@N00/429436900/ The funny thing is all tourists were a lot more interested in getting pictures of themselves against the sign, instead of the real landscape.

IraM,...Well, sort of. His first name was Garry, and although his last name was actually Winograd, he and others always spelled it "Winogrand." And the verbatim quote is "I photograph to find out what the world looks like photographed."

(A more obtuse and yet somehow more amusing statement of the same principle was when he said, "The way I understand it, a photographer's relationship to his medium is responsible for his relationship to the world is responsible for his relationship to his medium.")

I traveled extensively during the past summer, and was always amused of the swarms of digicams in the museums of Paris, Rome, and London. Whether you chimp or not, taking a picture of a masterpiece by itself is pointless. The only few times I did it was with my wife in the frame, usually striking a mock pose similar to that in the painting. With all the crappy lighting and no flash policy in virtually every museum, all efforts are doomed from the start.